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Sun Announces New MySQL, Michael Widenius Forks
viktor.91 writes "Sun Microsystems announced three new MySQL products: MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster 7.0 and MySQL Enterprise Partner Program for 'Remote DBA' service providers."
which showed up in the firehose today next to Glyn Moody's submission where he writes "Michael Widenius, founder and original developer of MySQL, says that most of the leading coders for that project have either left Sun or will be leaving in the wake of Oracle's takeover. To ensure MySQL's survival, he wants to fork from the official version — using his company Monty Program Ab to create what he calls a MySQL "Fedora" project. This raises the larger question of who really owns a commercial open software application: the corporate copyright holders, or the community?"
Did anyone else notice that his little toy database is practically useless without InnoDB, which was written by a third party and is owned by Oracle?
If you mean for transactions.
If you want a really fast free database that supports fulltext indexing, and you don't need transactions, MyISAM in the engine to use.
Or you can use SQLite, get more speed, and still have transactions. (Although fulltext indexing does require a loadable extension.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
FICS has been replaced by chessd: http://chessd.sourceforge.net/index-en.html
If MySQL had a BSD license it would be owned by the community.
If MySQL had a "non-free" commecial license it would be owned by Oracle.
The mess MySQL, and you, find yourselves in is because of MySQL's stupid dual-level license bullshit. Nobody seems to be able to figure it out or agree on it and it has caused more column inches of claptrap on Slashdot than the MySQL/PostgreSQL threads themselves. MySQL's originator's wanted to have it both ways: Lots-O-corporate money AND GPL poster child. Well they got their money alright, but to get it they had to pray for a really wealthy, poorly managed corporation to come along and vet their convoluted business plan. That would be Sun.
Now, with a billion dollars spent to "buy" MySQL but a bunch of forks still out there, no company in their right mind is going to invest anything in MySQL because they'll be worried Widenius will just steal the improvements and fork it again. MySQL is pariah, it's poisoned.
If you're running any kind of data volume worth talking about you're better off with PostgreSQL. Not only is it faster with *real* queries and more robust, but now it's safer going forward.
SQlite has supported per-table locking for a while, and I believe it supports per-row locking in some situations. It is not designed for concurrent writes, but it can be great for anything read-heavy workloads. It's certainly not suited for situations where you have a lot of concurrent writes, but for a CMS it can be a very good fit.
If you want full-text indexing, transactions, and lots of concurrent users, PostgreSQL is generally a better bet. MySQL is being squeezed at the bottom by SQLite and at the top by PostgreSQL, and both have less restrictive licenses (public domain and BSD, respectively). I'm amazed that it's survived this long.
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What do you think most companies do with an RDBMS if they are not building software on top of it?
Most people don't build software on top of an rdbms, they build software that uses and rdbms as a backend data store.
Dual Opteron < $600
And also consider that Oracle also has the Sleepycat Berkeley DB engine, which you really have to know where to find to get.
And they also have the old Digital database engine.
Their method is to acquire competitors and then slowly decrease development and avoid promoting the products. Then the products can silently die.
But I wonder if they haven't bitten into something a bit too hard to bite into this time...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The point of MySQL isn't a "lightning fast data indexing/accessing machine". The point of MySQL is the modular backends which enable it to serve as a common gateway to tables that each use the storage engine most appropriate to the way the table is used. (some of which may require a lightning fast data indexing/acessing engine and accept some risks to get it, some tables may not.)
The point of InnoDB (and, presumably, Falcon) is to support the kind of usage scenarios for which traditional RDBMS are designed, while the point of certain other MySQL table drivers is to support other types of loads.
The case related to a company who used ODBC and whether or not they binded to MySQL. It was not the NuSphere case, but one that used ODBC and MySQL.
The question was if your application used ODBC and MySQL was it binding in the GPL sense?
The answer was in the fact whether or not the application could function with another database. At the time the result was that MySQL lost the case since the application could function with another database.
It was around that time MySQL GPL'd all drivers, and changed their syntax so that it would only work on their servers. That way it is a GPL binding as per the court case.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Oh, sorry to reply yet again. Yes, I can name a number of project forks in which the original fell by the wayside as a fork took off. Not all the originals are dead, mind you, but the forks are much more popular. A few of these are situations in which the original is still viable (Debian, for example), but in which the fork has a huge number advantage or a lot of momentum.
GCC -> EGCS -> GCC
Mosaic -> Netscape
Netscape -> Mozilla
Mozilla (Seamonkey) -> Mozilla Firefox
KHTML -> WebKit
Debian -> Ubuntu
XFree -> X.org
StarOffice -> OpenOffice
SSH -> OpenSSH
Hack -> NetHack
osCommerce -> ZenCart
AT&T Unix -> BSD
From GP's comment, it sounded to me like MySQL AB has argued that any application that absolutely needs MySQL to function is a derivative work of MySQL, and thus, cannot be distributed without license from MySQL AB; and that therefore, to distribute such an application, one must either license it under the GPL, or obtain a commercial license from them. The argument seems to hold that whether the application links to a GPL-licensed MySQL client library or not is irrelevant; what would matter is whether the application can be functionally severed from MySQL.
Are you adequate?